Sissy Biscuit

I would like to tell you the great tale of how cake pops were invented. Once, there was a girl named Sally. She loved cake more than anything in the world. Knowing this, Sally’s friends baked her the most magnificent cake for her birthday. It had layers of flavors and tons of frosting and sprinkles and all of the shit that makes cake worth eating. In order to surprise her, Sally’s friends hid in her apartment and turned out all of the lights. But Sally’s friends were stupid, and they left the cake on the couch, and Sally came in to her apartment without turning the lights and promptly sat on her own birthday cake. It was a horrible surprise. Sally felt terrible, so she begged her friends to eat the smushed ass cake anyway. It was really weird, but they all ate it and pretended to love it. The next year, Sally purposefully crushed her cake again, thinking that her friends liked it that way and not realizing that they were just being polite. This is how cake pops were born—from a cake lover’s ass and mistakes/regrets.

At least, that’s what I imagine their origin story is. Why else would a human being openly choose to create such suffering? I would rather pass a kidney stone than make cake pops again. If it were my friend’s birthday I would pass a kidney stone, tie a balloon to it, and give it to them as a gift before I made them cake pops.

Because cake pops are the fanciful delusions of an emotionally unstable baker.

After making them I have decided that cake pops are as important to baking as a zipper is on a pair of sweatpants. They are completely ridiculous and unnecessary –and they will make you look like a fool in front of your friends.

Okay, that being said—cake pops were just a  single chapter in a great story of failure that was my Hayao Miyazaki party.

I love the Japanese animae Studio Ghibli films—Ponyo, Howl’s Moving Castle, My Neighbor Totoro, etc. Ever since I saw these completely charming cake pops based on the characters I knew that I had to throw my own Miyazaki movie themed party.

And why stop at cake pops? There are loads of themed food I could make! (More on that later.)

I wasn’t delusional enough to attempt to make a Totoro, but the little black dust ball— how hard could that be?

I never made cake pops before, but the internet told me it was easy. You should always believe the internet, right?

I assembled my ingredients, baked the cake, and cut a piece for Ralph so he would stop complaining that he wanted cake.

After it cooled, I took my rings off so they wouldn’t get ruined by me playing with my food. A lot of the tutorials on the internet were very specific about how you should crush the cake and blend it with frosting by hand. After doing it, I am convinced that you do NOT have to do it by hand. A spoon would have probably been fine, and whoever first decided to do it by hand would give Freud a field day. It felt really weird. …Not just the texture or the fact that I needed to wash my hands 1000 times to feel clean again, but I chose to make all chocolate so it looked…well…a lot like I was playing with my own poop. It was unsettling.

The instructions mostly said to roll the balls by hand, but I wanted my balls to all be uniform so I bought a special meat baller from Amazon. I loaded it up with the mixture, pulled out the ball and quickly realized that it was bigger and heavier than a golf ball. There was no way it would ever hold up on a skinny little stick. I found the tool because when I purchased the sticks online Amazon said, “Other people who bought those sticks bought this meat baller!” And I thought, “Oh, they must use that to make cake pops.” And what Amazon should have said is, “Other people making cake pops made the mistake of buying this good for nothing meat baller!”

Honestly, I never even ate MEATBALLS that big. I now own a tool with absolutely no use.

After I made the over-sized meatball, I made one more just because I felt like they should be in pairs. Then I sighed and started molding the rest with my hands. I could tell right away that this was going to be a problem since they were a wide range of sizes and the shapes varied from round-ish to hexagon.

The recipe for cake pops really only has two ingredients: cake and frosting. It seems like it would be nearly impossible to screw it up—like making chocolate milk. However, every recipe that I could find varied on how much frosting they used. People recommended everything from two tablespoons up to two cups. I had used somewhere in the middle, going by what “felt right.” Unfortunately, when you are mashing up cake with your bare hands, everything feels wrong. 

I put the balls in the fridge for two hours, and went about making the other things for my Hayao Miyazaki party, and cleaning up my kitchen because cake had gotten in every available crevice imaginable.

When I went back to the balls, they felt pretty cold, so I melted the chocolate for the outside layer. I put a stick in one of the balls and the ball immediately cracked in half. Unfortunately, I had already melted all of the chocolate in anticipation of using it. I crossed my fingers hoping that it would re-melt later and I put the cake balls in the freezer for a while.

In a half an hour, I tried again. If the balls didn’t work now, it would be too late to even serve them at the party. Since you can’t just bring Japanese anime themed cake pops casually to the office on Monday, the effort would be totally wasted. I tried to forge ahead, dipping balls while the other ones sat in the freezer. But the dipping chocolate had to be re-melted, and now it was sort of thick and gooey and it weighed down the balls so that when I stood them upright they exploded from the pressure (much like I was about to do emotionally).  Most of them made it close to the stage where I would dip them in sprinkles, and then they turned into road kill.

Every ten minutes Ralph walked slowly through the kitchen like someone staring at a car accident, then he would sneakily eat the road kill and leave.

By the fifth time he did it, I yelled at him.

“WILL YOU STOP COMING IN HERE, PLEASE? You can eat the mistakes later. I’m trying to concentrate.”

“They taste delicious! You could just serve them like this.”

“Ralph, I’ve hit a lot of hosting lows in my life, but I will not serve my guests a pile of sticky eyeballs in chocolate muck.”

By some miracle of science, I ended up getting a few of them to work, even though they balanced precariously on their sticks, and several of them did not get fully covered in sprinkles so they appeared to have mange.

I made 11.

Out of a recipe that was designed to make 50 cake pops, I had eleven.

And they looked like a motley crew with a wide range of thyroid disorders. Several of them were fat, some were skinny, and many appeared to have goiters.

My favorite of the group was one that I named “Sad Keanu.”

 He looked so pathetic that no one even wanted to eat him. Even Ralph, the scavenger, had too much heart to put Keanu out of his misery.

The rest of the themed food actually might have gone even worse than the cake pops, if you can believe it.

I had great intentions. I planned a Princess Mononoke Forest Salsa using lots of avocados so it would be nice and green. There would be spinach dip in a bread bowl designed to look like the bread that hung in the window for Kiki’s Delivery Service. Ralph and I crafted Calcifer the fire demon from Howl’s Moving Castle out of crudité (“crudite” is French for “the vegetable plate no one eats but everyone asks for if it’s not there”).  And, my favorite idea, was to make Ponyo jello shots using blue jello with little red Swedish fish in them to represent Ponyo. You can see the results for yourself. *tear*

I’ve made this salsa before, and it’s delicious–it’s mostly avocados, mangoes, and tomatoes. The reason that it failed is because there is also lots of cilantro in it. As it turns out, everyone at our party absolutely hated cilantro. So three pounds avocado salsa sat until it slowly browned and attracted lazy fruit flies.

As you can see, cutting a perfect circle in a bread bowl is a lot harder than you would think. About as hard as drawing a perfect circle, I guess. My Kiki that I made out of bread was unrecognizable, and her legs fells off, so I had to carefully place them near the broomstick. The end result is an unappetizing looking dish that people tried not to make direct eye contact with.

I was the most excited about the Ponyo Jello Shots, so I was heartbroken  when I realized that not only did they not look like I wanted them to, but they were a completely grotesque texture. The Swedish Fish had mummified and turned into a gelatinous fishy exoskeleton inside of the jello. Eating one was worse than eating the worm at the bottom of the bottom of tequila. At least the worm had protein in it, and not a faintly chemical odor. I cursed Pinterest for constantly making me set unachievable goals.

Some of our guests ate them and literally retched.

Ralph loves Miyazaki even more than I do, so he wanted to help with the party food so badly. The only problem is that he’s not really a cook.

“I’m going to put out these White Cheddar Cheez-its and called them ‘Kodama White Cheddar Cheez-its,” he said, proudly.

“Honey, that’s not really how it works. You have to actually have a recipe. You can’t just re-name a food that’s already made.”

“THEY ARE KODAMA WHITE CHEDDAR CHEEZ-ITS,” he yelled, shaking the box.

“But the Kodama look nothing like Cheez-its,” I said, gently.

“They are white and scary. Just like White Cheddar Cheez-its,” he said.  And then, just in case I tried to convince people otherwise, he made a sign for his snack.

They were the most liked item on the table.

So the story of my Miyazaki party is a great tale of love and loss, and it ends with two words–no, not “The End.”